How Do We Know That Piracy Isn't Really A Big Issue? Because Media Companies Still Haven't Needed To Change As A Result Of It

from the calling-their-bluff dept

One of the positive outcomes of the debate that has raged around SOPA/PIPA is that more people have looked at the facts, rather than listened to the rhetoric, surrounding piracy. In particular, the copyright industries' hitherto unchallenged claim that piracy is destroying their business is finally being challenged – not least by reports like "The Sky is Rising" that consolidate industry figures to show that things are really looking pretty good across the board.

Another indication of that new attitude is the incredible response elicited by an article in Forbes entitled "You Will Never Kill Piracy, and Piracy Will Never Kill You", which has received over 3600 re-tweets on Twitter, and nearly 10,000 shares on Facebook. The basic argument will be familiar enough to Techdirt readers: that the war on piracy can never be "won", and that what is needed is a change of attitude on the part of the media companies. The article concludes:

Treat your customers with respect, and they’ll do the same to you. And that is how you fight piracy.

Pretty obvious, you would have thought, although strangely it isn't to the media companies.

The author of that piece, Paul Tassi, has followed it up with "Lies, Damned Lies and Piracy." Although this has proved far less popular than the first one, I think it's better, because it offers some original insights where the other went over well-trod ground.

I particularly liked his closing thoughts:

If the industry is struggling, I just don’t see it, as their projects are getting bigger and more costly with each passing year. When a movie bombs or a show gets cancelled, no one ever says “oh, well, piracy.” Rather, it’s the quality of the product that accounts for such failures. Even with relatively high piracy rates across all forms of media, we’re still seeing blockbuster films, shows and games released at a higher rate than ever, and profits to match.

I think the media industries would love to kill piracy with a quick piece of legislation that blacks out every torrent site on the internet, but I don’t think they want to fight it so much that they’ll change their entire distribution model on a dime, which would actually go a long way toward truly competing with piracy. The reason things are the way they are is because they’re working. Despite the fact that even though yes, every piece of media is available on the internet for free somewhere, people are still buying.

There are three really key points packed in there. First, that the media industries just aren't struggling, despite their cries of woe. Secondly, what causes real financial harm to the film and music worlds are bad products that lose huge amounts of money and disappoint audiences. And finally – and most importantly – if piracy really were so life-threatening to the copyright industries, and if their bottom lines really were in danger, then they would have tried something other than begging lawmakers to protect them. The fact that they haven't, as Tassi emphasizes, means that there is no real pressure on them to do so: people still buy lots of stuff, piracy isn't really a problem, things are working.

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One site, no......you'd have to shut down every single site that even makes mention of piracy, which ofcourse will lead to internet shaping, which in turn will lead to a real danger of censorship, but its cool, our governments and governments supporters have assured us that'll never happen, by claiming, entire sites need to be shut down because of 1% of users

Disclaimer = That 1% should not be considered accurate or an approximate, but an emphasis on a theoretical subject

OT: The Long Arm Of Uncle Sam Just Got Longer

This one's hot off the presses. Just yesterday, our friends at the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) issued a press release on its latest ruling related to foreign 'money service businesses (MSBs).'

Frequently, traditional MSB clients tended to be individuals without bank accounts or access to credit. But increasingly, the US government is looking at companies engaged in electronic payments, crowdsourced funding, and even microcredit finance as money service businesses.

The implication? They should all be regulated. Even if they're not even US companies.

That's right. FinCEN's latest ruling suggests a foreign MSB may now be subject to US regulations AND CRIMINAL PENALTIES "even if none of its agents, agencies, branches or offices are physically located in the United States."

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I feel like they can make a bot instead of paying these shills to come and post all the time. Simple rules = can be botted:

1) If the bot can spout out an overly broad and extremely inaccurate statement to "prove" it's right, do that.
2) If not, just claim that whoever wrote the article or their sources are all on one side, therefore they're not legit (and ignore that anything the bot says is more 1-sided than any other source can possibly be).

There, I've laid the foundation to make your job no longer needed. Sucks to think that that your job is so useless that you can be replaced with 2 rules like that, eh?

I would say it is not true that they are unchanged when there has been many changes. They are just not reinventing themselves when they prefer to lock up their old market than to embrace the new market.

MP3s and FLAC files are clearly not creations of the content industry which are normally subject to encryption and content control. Piracy has created the whole market here.

You are now able to buy DVDs and Blurays much faster without society going through the PPV phaze, renting phaze, movie station phaze and more first. This is them aiming to beat piracy by getting out into the market early.

Then 3D had been rushed into cinemas much faster to give people a viewing experience that piracy could not.

So thanks to piracy they have made large progress. This now continues with getting media distributed across the world faster.

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But they have. Every US company and a number of non-US companies that host user-generated content have to have DMCA agents, regardless of location. Megaupload had it operators arrested for doing somethign that wasn't criminal in their hosting nation, mnaking other similar companies have to change.

So fuck off back under that rock or go pound sand into a glass window.

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Using the failed logic of the *aa's. New tech companies havent started up, and existing ones arent innovating existing products, because they are afraid of bogus lawsuits that would put hem out of business or cost them more money than it would to start the company.

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Despite the occasional price hikes and blunders, Netflix treats its customer with respect, actually cares about customer service and picture quality, and doesn't accuse you if you lose a disc or do something wrong.

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Opinion is fact. Piracy is slavery. Copying is cheating.

RIAA Expert #1: The internet is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions.
Congress: What do you mean, "biblical"?
MPAA Expert: What he means is Old Testament, Congress, real wrath of God type stuff.
RIAA Expert #1: Exactly.
RIAA Expert #2: Fire and brimstone coming down from the skies! Rivers and seas boiling!
MPAA Expert: Forty years of darkness! Earthquakes, volcanoes...
IFPI Expert: The pirates rising from MegaUpload and Pirate Bay!
RIAA Expert #1: Data sacrifice, dogs and cats living together... mass hysteria!
Congress: All right, all right! I get the point!

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You are now able to buy DVDs and Blurays much faster without society going through the PPV phaze, renting phaze, movie station phaze and more first. This is them aiming to beat piracy by getting out into the market early.

Absolutely agree, and wish they would get to work on it. I would like to rent a Blu-Ray copy of the movie the moment it comes out in movie theaters. And here is why ---

Then 3D had been rushed into cinemas much faster to give people a viewing experience that piracy could not.

I went to see my first 3D (RealD, whatever that is) movie last week. I didn't pay for the ticket -- my mother gave me a $15 dollar gift certificate for Christmas, so she bought the ticket, otherwise I would not have gone. And yes, what brought me out, but the worst Star Wars movie ever! I went and saw Jar Jar Binks in his 3D glory.

Now, I actually liked the 3D pod racing -- and unlike what others have said, the 3D in this movie was well done. But even then, the experience sucked! I was in a movie theater of 130-140 people, most of us actually wanted to see the movie, but I still hated every minute of the experience. 5 kids sat behind me throwing popcorn and making stupid jokes during the movie, while their parents sat and did nothing. A good two-thirds of the audience checked their phones every 20 minutes, and I heard a dozen or two phone calls come in and answered during the movie. Had the sound been turned up to a decent decibel, it would have drowned most of this out, but the theater's 6.1 speaker system was soft enough that through many of the parts I was trying to use my memory to fill in the dialog I couldn't hear. And the screen was so dark and flickered quite often.

I want to be able to rent or buy a movie, for a reasonable price, the moment it comes out in the theaters, so I can play it at home on my 7.1 sound system, at the sound level I can hear the movie, on the 10 ft projector screen (which supports 1080p/3D) with my friends -- not with 90-100 people who decided that it was a good deal to waste 2 hours watching a movie they really didn't want to see in the first place.

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But their Headquarters were not - they were in Hong Kong. Not only that, but tthe USTR is effectively declaring war not only on the Internet, but also Spain, Sweden, Australia and New Zealand, to name a few, by inisiting that everyone else should come up to THIER IP standards, rather than having their own, or actually working with the public to find an agreement.

Y'know, like in the original intent of Copyright and Patents (which, I might add, were a mercantilistic operation by thew Guilds of the Stuart monarchs' time.

Wolverine

I think the only time unauthorized online distribution of a film actually impacted movie box office significantly was the Wolverine movie. When it was leaked in an unfinished form, the studio was quick to assert it was far from finished and lacked most SFX. However, what the leak actually accomplished was letting people know how back the story was and therefore some people who would have ignored bad reviews and saw it on opening night actually held back. I'm sure some went anyway for the SFX. But, I think this is really just tantamount to a movie reviewer breaking an embargo and warning people in advance that a new release is horrible.

The Potential For Cost-Cutting-- The Historical Parallel of Newspapers.

Rupert Murdoch became rich, largely because, in the 1970's, he was one of the first newspaper proprietors to recognize the economic potential of word processors and kindred software. Word processors liquidated the economic value of the skills of union printers. Anyone who could type could put copy into the system, and once it was in the system, it could be edited without being retyped. Traditionally, typing material into a Linotype machine had been a specialized skill, comparable to operating a keypunch machine in data processing. In the new word-processing regime, stored data could be just fed into the machine, and so be printed. Printing could easily be outsourced to independent printing plants, and a newspaper could keep on publishing, even if it was in the middle of a violent labor strike. Even if the journalists of a local paper went on strike, the management could put together a presentable paper from the wire-service material and the syndicated features, downloaded and cut-and-pasted into the page. Murdoch, recognizing all of this, bought up newspapers which were unprofitable because their labor expenses were too high, and picked fights with the unions, and won the fights, so that the newspapers became profitable. Now, eventually, of course, the wheel turned full circle, and websites began to do to Murdoch what he had done to the union printers. You reap what you sow.

Just as the union printers, in their desperation, resorted to criminal acts such as throwing bricks at people, Murdock and his friends, in their turn, and out of a similar sense of desperation, eventually resorted to the various acts for which they are presently being investigated.

Well, the same process is about to repeat itself in Hollywood. The economic value of the skills of most of the employees will be liquidated. The movie-industry unions presently worry about "runaway productions," in Canada or New Zealand, but that is only the beginning. The central locus of film production is shifting from the stage to the computer. Instead of making things come together on a stage, in front of a camera, the technologically progressive film-maker causes things to come together inside a computer.

Take as an example, the new Lytro camera. It is essentially a massive array of microscopic cameras, which captures what amounts to a hologram instead of a two dimensional image. This means than focus and exposure do not have to be determined at the time pictures are taken, and it also means that the camera records depth information as well as color and brightness. The first property means that the camera crew does not have to be so large. The second property is more interesting, because it enables something like "greenscreen" technique, only without the green background. The post-processing software can be programed to ignore anything which doesn't fall into focus inside a specified distance range, in a particular direction. An array of Lytro cameras can be built into a cart or a vehicle, very much on the principle of Google Street View, and sent out to inexpensively collect three-dimensional background scenery. So there is no longer any need to film on location, with all the expenses that involves, and likewise, a drastically reduced need for stage carpenters, grips, and similar trades. The cameras and similar equipment in the studio can be built into robots, and operated under remote control from... wherever. Similarly, large arrays of microphone can generate signals which can be processed to extract the desired sound, on much the same principle as the Lytro camera. Of course, all of this results in more post-processing work, but that can take place in India or China. Let us say that the developed-country labor requirements of film-making might be reduced by a factor of ten.

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RIAA: The internet is headed for a disaster of biblical proportions!
Rational Person: You mean you're worried about a disaster which is an unreasonably popular fable functionally indistinguishable from communal fantasy?

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How do we know that copyright is a big issue?
Even if you deny that damage exists, why would it even be a risk to the tech industry if copyright and the power of "rights" holders had not been inflated beyond reason?

piracy, funny the price went up because

Isn't it funny how Sony drove up the price of Whitney Houston media material after her death. was it because of piracy, ABSOLUTELY NOT!!! It was due to Sony's desire to cash in on a rise in popularity of her music since people flock to buy more of it after something happens to the artist.

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I'm waiting for them to shut down all these pesky sites with "independent" content. Then we'll see big increases in sales of mainstream entertainment from big companies, proving that these others were stealing from them.

WTF

Re: Damned pirate sympathizer

Right. That will surely hinder us. A webpage that 2% of pirates have heard of and of which 10% use. I don't think you know what you are talking about.
Anyway, if any of the real pirate pages go down there will be a whole community of pirates setting up new servers as opposed to just the one. I think that we'll be fine.

Competition

Sure you can buy things buts nice to get them free. Would you rather build a house or buy one. Well its EASIER to buy one. Less work. So! Make it so easy to buy something, the lazy ones or the extremely frugal, would rather not pirate.

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Irrational Person: You mean you're worried about a disaster which is from a source I just can't accept as valid merely due to my fear of actually discovering it's more solid than I want to believe? Because my worldview has been built up on misinterpretations and misrepresentations of that source rather than deeply investigating it firsthand with a truly open mind? Because I don't want to admit that I don't know the source nearly as well as I like to pretend I do? That it's easier to dismiss it as just another fable rather than dig into it and try to get past my own preconceptions about it? That I can't admit that what I think I know about it may not, in fact, be accurate? And that my view of the source is based not on fact, but on such inaccurate preconceptions, misinterpretations, and misrepresentations?

Sorry, don't want to take things off track, just wanted to answer the comment, is all. No need to get into a debate or anything.